Tuesday, 16 May 2017

To 5 Year Old's Mummy's delight, the 5 Year Old has become a bit obsessed with "Anne with an 'E'", the latest retelling of "Anne of Green Gables." This is made even more exciting when we reveal to her that her middle name is, indeed, Anne with an 'E' because of this very book. If only 5 Year Old's Daddy had "The Doctor" as his middle name, how perfect would that be?

Anyway, much like with "Frozen" back in the day, 5 Year Old must be doing what Anne is doing. Anne has a glass of milk, 5 Year Old has a glass of milk. Anne stands on a chair, 5 Year Old stands on a chair. Anne gets accidentally drunk on home made wine she thinks is strawberry cordial, 5 Year Old's Daddy presses fast forward...

She asks 5 Year Old's Mummy if she can get an Anne dress-up costume, which seems quite do-able as she largely wears shapeless smocks. (5 Year Old's Daddy presses fast forward as Matthew goes to his lost love's dress shop for an expensive grown-up dress with puff sleeves).

"Will it come with freckles," she muses, "or must I draw those on? And should they be brown like my hair or orange like Anne's?" This is a philosophical dilemma beyond both parents.

Further through the latest episode she suddenly pipes up with "How do they make the drawings move?"

"What drawings?" I ask.

"The drawings of Anne and everybody."

"They aren't drawings," I protest, "they are real people."

"But they are on TV," she counters, "and you said things on TV like "My Little Pony" were lots of drawings."

"Yes, cartoons are," I agree, "they make those by doing hundreds of drawings where each character moves a tiny bit, then they photograph all the drawings and show them on screen really quickly one after another so it looks like they are moving." Daddy suspects that animation hasn't been done like this since about 1977, but sometimes he has to think on his feet. "These are real people in dress up pretending to be Anne and her friends."

"So how do they get the pretending on the telly?"

"Someone films it like you sometimes film yourself pretending to be Youtube on Mummy's phone."

"Whoa!" She thought that this show was epic before. Now, her mind is blown.

Tuesday, 9 May 2017

The 5 Year Old has been in a thoughtful rather than talkative mood recently, but today she has a new idea playing on her mind.

"What if everyone in the world had to cancel their birthday?" she asks.

"Why would they do that?" I ask.

"Because no-one will come to their party!" Obviously.

"No-one will come to anyone's party? That seems a bit unlikely..."

"But what if everyone in the world gets chicken pox?" she asks, with a big gesture.

"What, at once?" I cry.

"People do all get ill at once sometimes!"

"That would be some epidemic," I shrug. "Chicken pox only lasts about a week, though. Everyone doesn't have a birthday on the same day, though, some parties could go ahead."

"No!" she insists. "This chicken pox will last a year!"

Well, no arguing with that.

"Well, in the unlikely event that a chicken pox epidemic overtook the entire world at the same time, even the people who had already had it, and lasted an entire year, then I imagine that lots of birthday parties would be cancelled, yes."

"That would be sad," she nods glumly.

"On the bright side, it would be great news for all the chiggy-wigs!" I chip in.

"Why's THAT?" she asks.

"Well," I say, in a vaguely post-modern nod to this blog I read called The Philosophy of a 5 Year Old, "chiggy-wigs eat chicken pox, don't they?"

"That is ridiculous," she snorts, having spent a half term studying insects since our prior conversation, "they are called woodlice, and they eat leaves!"